What's Inside

Present with a Past Future Twist

12/13/17

Shea Stanfield
Arts Columnist

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do.” ~ Steve Jobs Local artist Marcy Warner approaches her creativity with similar expansive thinking of Apple’s founder, with a mix of the refined imaginative design sensibility, added to the mix by lead designer Jonny Ives. The result is a vision of our past southwest cultural with a provocative twist for present and future.

Born in Minneapolis, MN and raised in Indianapolis with the four seasons and mounds of leaves and snow, Marcy didn’t have an inkling that she was destined for a life in the mighty expanses of the Southwestern United States. Fate stepped in when her family moved to Arizona during her 16th year. She would go on to attend Glendale Community College for two years before transferring to Arizona State University, where she graduated in 1975 with her Bachelor degree in Art Education. She then stepped off into a job as an art teacher with the Scottsdale Unified School District, settling into a career at Chaparral High School where she continues to inspire generations of successful art students. Marcy did return to ASU to finish a Masters in Curriculum Development while she was teaching, eventually emerging to apply new skills to her Advanced Placement Art Program. The results were students with a laser focus for their creative specialties and increased college admittance and scholarships to prestigious arts institutions around the country and internationally. All the while, she continued to push the envelope on her own artistic expressions.

Marcy firmly believes to be a successful art teacher, one must be a successful artist in his or her own right. To this end, she became a wildly successful watercolor/acrylic artist, working on commission, painting a variety of subjects while specializing in family portraits. Themes centering on family and family history are rooted in her own upbringing where her mother, grandmother, and older sister were a constant inspiration and encouragement for her creative outlets. Marcy credits her older sister for her latest body of work: “She has an amazing collection of Mexican folk art, so we started working together on collage art.” Marcy researched, photographed, and photo-shopped Mexican and Spanish images from old books, museums, and her sister’s collection, developing a series of intricately collaged images with copper tooling and sculptured frames.

Today, Marcy works from her home studio where she can spread out, keep a number of projects going, and work relatively uninterrupted. She is represented by Adelente Art gallery in Carefree, AZ, a gallery that specializes in Mexican Folk art and is one of the area’s most established galleries that carries just about anything for an imaginative designer or gift-giver, www.adelanteartgallery.com. Marcy also participates in the Dia de los Muertos Festival at the Mesa Center for the Arts and The Day of the Dead Festival at The Desert Botanical Gardens. She can also be found supporting and participating in the small business artist event at The Scottsdale Center for the Arts each year. If you are looking for a unique and special gift with that uniquely “present historic” southwestern flare, make a point of visiting Adelente Art gallery for a sample of Marcy Warner’s work. If you have a commission in mind for yourself or others, Marcy is available at (480) 252-4288.